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Hopeful books

These books share a belief that hope is something you practise rather than wait for, usually in small, ordinary acts. In «Το νόημα της ζωής», Viktor Frankl looks for what makes a life worth living after everything else has been stripped away, and finds it in the stubborn details of each day; in The Secret Garden, a sour child and a locked patch of earth show what steady attention can grow. You'd come to them for company rather than instruction, for stories that take difficulty seriously and still leave room for change.

A page that shows it

The nothing-to-lose freedom of being robbed in a foreign country.

He looked around at the empty plaza again, feeling less desperate than before. This wasn’t a strange place; it was a new one…he had already traveled farther than any shepherd he knew. Oh, if they only knew how different things are just two hours by ship from where they are, he thought….As he mused about these things, he realized that he had to choose between thinking of himself as the poor victim of a thief and as an adventurer in quest of his treasure. “I’m an adventurer, looking for treasure,” he said to himself.
Excerpt from The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho 1988. Quoted for discovery. Source Rights & removals

  1. The Alchemist

    Paulo Coelho, 1988

    A shepherd crosses the Sahara chasing a recurring dream, meeting a king, an alchemist and his own fear, in a fable about whether desire is a compass or a trap.

  20. Life of Pi

    Yann Martel, 2001

    A boy survives 227 days in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger and comes back with a story about faith, fear and which version of events you choose to believe.

  24. Educated

    Tara Westover, 2018

    A girl grows up without school or doctors on an Idaho mountain, then teaches herself enough to leave—and has to decide what leaving costs.

A taste of the feed

  1. There is a kind of crying that only happens where nobody can hear it.

    Everything else about the three-years-ago scene was different, though. That time, I was not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom of the big house in the suburbs of New York which I’d recently purchased with my husband. It was a cold November, around three o’clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.

    Eat, Pray, Love · Elizabeth Gilbert

  2. The difference between being in the house and being present in it.

    I reminded the men in the audience that being a father meant more than fathering a child; that even those of us who were physically present in the home are often emotionally absent; that precisely because many of us didn’t have fathers in the house we have to redouble our efforts to break the cycle; and that if we want to pass on high expectations to our children, we have to have higher expectations for ourselves.

    The Audacity of Hope · Barack Obama

  3. The fastest thing in the sky turns out not to be a number.

    You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.

    Jonathan Livingston Seagull · Richard Bach

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